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Silvia Mosso 1Research Connection 2009: the LUNA project 1
Prague, 7 May 2009Research Connection 2009
Silvia Mosso
LUNA: the Power of Understanding
Silvia Mosso 2Research Connection 2009: the LUNA project
Background
A number of existing telephone services offer IVR-like interfaces:
• System-driven dialogues: require responses with specific words or short sentences proposed by the system
• Long menus: tedious, and options are difficult to remember. VUIs demand shorter, simpler menus compared to GUIs.
• Number of steps: an excessive number of levels must often be negotiated before callers achieve desired objective
• All these aspects increase call duration, and reduce quality of user experience
Wouldn’t it be better just to tell the service what you want?
Silvia Mosso 3Research Connection 2009: the LUNA project
Objectives
The goal is not to achieve human-like interaction, but to allow users to express their needs to an automated system in their own words, and consequently to achieve their goals quickly and accurately.
The objective of the LUNA project is the
robust, real time understanding of
spontaneous speech, well beyond the state of
the art, to create advanced-dialogue
applications.
The solution is a “natural language” interface
Silvia Mosso 4Research Connection 2009: the LUNA project
The consortium
Silvia Mosso 5Research Connection 2009: the LUNA project
Results
• Development of a toolkit for multilingual dialogue services
– Architecture in 3 levels growing levels of interaction complexity, from call routing and classification to context-sensitive validation in complex, spoken dialogue applications
• Prototypes in three languages: French, Italian, Polish
• Validation of the results in different application scenarios
Challenges:– The availability of speech corpora is a major issue - data collection
and annotation are expensive need for incremental learning algorithms
– Spontaneous speech doesn’t usually follow the rules of written language; furthermore, a SLU system must be robust to errors introduced by the speech recognizer
– Portability across languages and applications is a big challenge Key LUNA innovation: first system of its kind in the Polish language
Silvia Mosso 6Research Connection 2009: the LUNA project
Impact
• Evolution of human-machine interaction in automated call centers:– To increase the automation rate of telephone services
– To shorten call duration, thanks to a reduced waiting time
– To overcome the distrust of communicating with machines, and to enhance the user experience
• Competitive advantage for the industrial partners of the consortium
• Scientific excellence of European research institutions, results comparable with USA
• Future research activities :– Integration with robotics – e.g. domestic appliances which can
understand spoken language
– Cooperative interfaces
Silvia Mosso 7Research Connection 2009: the LUNA project
EU funding benefits
EU funding can help to:
• Encourage cooperation between European technological leaders
• Create a network between industry and academic institutions
• Foster interdisciplinary and cross-sector partnerships
• Facilitate massive investment which generates specific know-how,
which would otherwise not be possible for either small-medium
companies or universities • Stimulate strategic and visionary R&D, thanks to financial support• Cultivate new channels for exploitation by industry, early
validation and marketing
Silvia Mosso 8Research Connection 2009: the LUNA project
Thank you for listening!
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